Cheap Praise and Costly Praise

One of the more popular devotional/praise songs when I was in college, and one still used on our campus, was "The Steadfast Love of the Lord Never Ceases." The lyrics:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.
His mercies never come to an end.
They are new every morning.
Great is your faithfulness.
The Lord is my portion says my soul.
Therefore I will hope in Him.

The lyrics come from Lamentations 3.22-24 (the exact wording is from the ESV). It's a great song but I have some problems with how we sing it. Specifically, the song is taken out of context.

What is missing when this song is sung is Lamentations 3.1-21, all the verses leading up to this outpouring of praise. These verses are critical if we are to properly understand the sort of faith being expressed in verses 22-24.

Here are verses 1-21 (NLT). They are an extraordinarily raw and heart wrenching expression of lament and accusation:

I am the one who has seen the afflictions
that come from the rod of the Lord’s anger.
He has led me into darkness,
shutting out all light.
He has turned his hand against me
again and again, all day long.

He has made my skin and flesh grow old.
He has broken my bones.
He has besieged and surrounded me
with anguish and distress.
He has buried me in a dark place,
like those long dead.

He has walled me in, and I cannot escape.
He has bound me in heavy chains.
And though I cry and shout,
he has shut out my prayers.
He has blocked my way with a high stone wall;
he has made my road crooked.

He has hidden like a bear or a lion,
waiting to attack me.
He has dragged me off the path and torn me in pieces,
leaving me helpless and devastated.
He has drawn his bow
and made me the target for his arrows.

He shot his arrows
deep into my heart.
My own people laugh at me.
All day long they sing their mocking songs.
He has filled me with bitterness
and given me a bitter cup of sorrow to drink.

He has made me chew on gravel.
He has rolled me in the dust.
Peace has been stripped away,
and I have forgotten what prosperity is.
I cry out, “My splendor is gone!
Everything I had hoped for from the Lord is lost!”

The thought of my suffering and homelessness
is bitter beyond words.
I will never forget this awful time,
as I grieve over my loss.
Yet I still dare to hope
when I remember this:

And it is here, at this moment, where, inexplicably, the song of praise breaks out:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.
His mercies never come to an end.
They are new every morning.
Great is your faithfulness.
The Lord is my portion says my soul.
Therefore I will hope in Him.

Now here's what I want to ask you. Isn't it cheating a bit to jump to verse 22 without first singing verses 1-21? And yet, that's what we do in worship. We skip to verse 22. Literally and metaphorically. Skipping over the lament we jump straight into the praise. We skip over the brokenness. The sorrow. The tears. The grief. The despair. The anger. The pain. The doubt. The god-forsakenness.

We skip over it all and start worship at verse 22.

And what sort of spirituality does that create? Answer: It creates a false, cotton-candy sort of spirituality. A spirituality that wants to jump to the happy ending without the dark and painful journey of lament. It makes me think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's distinction between Cheap Grace and Costly Grace. I wonder if we should start talking about Cheap Praise and Costly Praise.

Cheap Praise starts with verse 22. Costly Praise starts with verse 1.

To be clear, I'm not saying that we shouldn't sing verses 22-24. I'm just saying it's cheap to skip ahead. Skipping ahead you skip over the experience where God is a wild animal who drags you off the path and tears you to pieces, leaving you bloody and broken. Skipping ahead you skip over the experience where God stands you up against the wall and uses you for target practice, shooting his arrows deep into your heart.

If we start the song, as we often do, with verse 22 we get one sort of spirituality. A spirituality of cheap praise. But if we start the song in verse 1 we get something very different, costly praise. A praise that is hard-won, honest, and truthful.

And it all boils down to where you start the song.